A home for my thoughts (in between naps)

July 2010 Archives

July 19, 2010

Get Ready to Slash the Web!

After months and months of busting our butts, we’re getting ready to introduce blekko to the world. We gave Mike Arrington a bit of a sneak peak and it seems like he agrees with us – blekko is pretty cool. Check out Rich's take here.

Our core value is that we are finally giving users a direct say in what their search results look like. A simple slashtag appended to a query (/techblogs, /videogames, etc.) lets users slash the crappy sites out of their results and only search the good sites. Sometimes the real power of search is in what you don’t search, not what you do.

Check out our search results for a gamed health query like “avoiding swine flu" - blekko shows results from trusted sites like WebMD, CDC, Healthline - these are the sources you want to see:

We've created hundreds of slashtags like /health for you to use - but those are just there to get you started. You can make slashtags with just your favorite sites and share them with others. You now drive the search engine, not vice versa.

The SEO gamers, content farmers and link shoppers are not going to be happy.
These guys are flooding the web with content designed to turn a profit, not inform, and the searcher pays the price. One company alone generates literally tens of thousands of pages every day that are solely designed to make money from SEO traffic. Slashtags are the perfect way to bypass them and search only the sites you like.

One more reason the content farmers aren't going to be happy: we're opening up all the data that is the core foundation of their business. Link data, site data, rank data - all there for everyone to see. In one fell swoop the playing field just got leveled. Pretty cool, eh?

With that, we’re just starting this journey. We know we have a long way to go. You work like the devil in your own little bubble building new search technology. Then you let a few people that you know come in and take a look and bang on it a little bit. You make some changes and improvements based on that feedback. And then you slowly let users come in and try the thing. And finally one day you throw the floodgates open and let the world come in. We’ll be starting to let people kick the tires over the next few weeks.

Drop me a line if you’d like to get an invite to the beta when it is available.